Endeavour's Astronauts Prepare Experiment To Study Sun's Hot Wind

Despite Last-minute Glitches And Iffy Weather, The Shuttle Roared Into Orbit With No Big Problems.

September 8, 1995|By Seth Borenstein of The Sentinel Staff

CAPE CANAVERAL — The shuttle Endeavour's astronauts will spend their first full day in space setting up an experiment today to study the sun's superhot wind that sometimes disrupts technology on Earth.

It was a shift in a different kind of wind Thursday morning that kept storm clouds temporarily at bay, allowing the hard-luck crew of the Endeavour to blast through a clearing and into orbit.

The five-man crew, who nicknamed themselves ''The Dogs of Summer,'' walked out on the way to their shuttle with a triumphant dog howl by Commander David Walker of Eustis. At 11:09 a.m. they lifted off on an 11-day mission jam-packed with science work.

Technical glitches plagued Endeavour for more than a month, and more cropped up just before and after launch. The last-minute problems weren't serious, NASA officials said.

The weather was more of a worry Thursday morning.

''We were kind of sitting in just the correct place to launch from the Kennedy Space Center,'' said Loren Shriver, who heads the shuttle mission-management team. ''And it worked out just fine.''

Astronauts will release a $13 million astronomy satellite at 11:44 a.m. today to get measurements of the wind that blasts off the sun's surface. Scientists hope to combine those readings with data from a probe flying above the sun's north pole.

Scientists said they recently found that the gas in the solar wind was 10 million degrees - 10 times hotter than they had thought - and spewing out twice as fast as they figured, at 500 miles per second.

Now they want to know why it's that strong and how it causes problems on Earth, said John Kohl, an astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian Observatory outside Boston.

''The solar wind can cause currents in the Earth's outer atmosphere, sometimes called geomagnetic storms, that result in power surges that can sometimes knock out communications,'' Kohl said Thursday. Those storms cause about $100 million in damage each year, he said.

Solar wind has temporarily shut down a Quebec hydroelectric plant and knocked out two Canadian satellites, but it also creates the vivid aurora borealis, NASA Space Physics Director George Withbroe said.

The solar wind also may play a small role in everyday changes in Earth's lower atmosphere, such as the wind shifts that allowed Endeavour to launch, Kohl said.

Endeavour's launch was delayed for more than a month as NASA tracked and fixed potential hot gas leaks in the shuttle's rocket boosters. Then the launch was delayed a week to replace a faulty fuel cell.

Thursday's liftoff was proceeding without a hitch until about an hour before launch time, when all sorts of problems - with hatch doors, boilers and sensors - cropped up, launch director James Harrington said. But they were fixed or found to be minor, he said.

Shriver called it an ''absolutely successful launch.''

Given the delays the shuttle had, finally getting off the ground was important, said Winston Scott, an astronaut who will fly on the next Endeavour mission in January.